Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Sarah Palin and her family were warned by a judge to stop "disparaging" the reputation of Alaska State Trooper Michael Wooten, who at the time was undergoing a bitter separation and divorce from Palin's sister Molly.

And an official of the Alaska State Troopers' union told the court that Palin, who was then a private citizen, and members of her family lodged up to a dozen complaints against Wooten.

The union official told the judge that he had never before been asked to appear as a divorce-case witness, that the union believed family complaints against Wooten were "not job-related," and that Wooten was being "harassed" by Palin and other family members.

Court documents show that Judge Suddock was disturbed by the alleged attacks by Palin and her family members on Wooten's behavior and character.

So, Palin had a history of harassing this man long before she became governor when she is alleged to have sacked Walter Monegan, the state's public safety director, because - claims Monegan - he refused to fire Wooten on Palin's request.

Palin certainly had an unhealthy record regarding Wooten which the judge noted before she even became governor.

Indeed, the judge went as far as to warn the family that he would curb Palin's sister's child custody rights if the attacks on Wooten didn't stop:

In monitoring how a joint-custody arrangement worked out, the judge said in his order that he would pay particular attention to problems noted by a "custody investigator," specifically "the disparagement of the father [Wooten] by the mother [Molly Hackett, Sarah Palin's sister] and her family members."

"It is the mother's [Hackett's] responsibility to set boundaries for her relatives and insure [sic] they respect them, and the disparagement by either parent, or their surrogates is emotional child abuse," Judge Suddock wrote.

He added that: "If the court finds it is necessary due to disparagement in the Mat-Su Valley [the area north of Anchorage where Palin and her extended family live], for the children's best interests, it [the court] will not hesitate to order custody to the father and a move into Anchorage." Cyr, the union official, said that to his knowledge, no such move was ever ordered.

Of course we know, despite this warning from the judge, that Palin and her husband continued to disparage Wooten, even going as far as naming him as "a potential physical threat" during her first security briefing with a representative of the state police.

So, she ignores the warnings from the judge, even when the judge has threatened that her sister will lose custody of her child if she continues to make disparaging remarks about Wooten.

It's hard not to believe that something negative is going to come from an investigation into all this as there's a vindictiveness about Palin's behaviour here that borders on unhinged. Despite a clear court warning she simply couldn't help herself from continually hounding this man and attempting to have him fired.

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Obama '08

That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.

The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.